“The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again.And how did this affect him—the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the leftfield line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the Swede. Unlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot-stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashed. The cheer rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he gained a yard or intercepted a pass. Even at the sparsely attended home baseball games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first base.”

“Nancy told everyone, "I can begin by saying something to you about this cemetery, because I've discovered that my father's grandfather, my great-grandfather, is not only buried in the original few acres alongside my great-grandmother but was one of its founders in 1888. The association that first financed and erected the cemetery was composed of the burial societies of Jewish benevolent organizations and congregations scattered across Union and Essex counties. My great-grandfather owned and ran a boarding house in Elizabeth that catered especially to newly arrived immigrants, and he was concerned with their well-being as more than a mere landlord. That's why he was among the original members who purchased the open field that was here and who themselves graded and landscaped it, and why he served as the first cemetery chairman. He was relatively young then but in his full vigor, and it's his name alone that is signed to the document specifying that the cemetery was for `burying deceased members in accordance with Jewish law and ritual.' As is all too obvious, the maintenance of individual plots and of the fencing and the gates is no longer what it should be. Things have rotted and toppled over, the gates are rusted, the locks are gone, there's been vandalism. By now the place has become the butt end of the airport and what you're hearing from a few miles away is the steady din of the New Jersey Turnpike. Of course I thought first of the truly beautiful places where my father might be buried, the places where he and my mother used to swim together when they were young, and the places where he loved to swim at the shore.”

“how do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde? my contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak - the lives they must lead behind those goyische curtains! maybe a pride of shikses is more like it - or is it a pride of shkotzim? for these are the girls whose older brothers are the engaged, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks for the collage football teams called northwestern and texas christian and ucla. their fathers are men with white hair and deep voices who never use double negatives, and their mothers the ladies with the kindly smiles and the wonderful manners who say things like, "i do believe, mary, that we sold thirty-five cakes at the bake sale." "don't be too late, dear," they sing out sweetly to their little tulips as they go bouncing off in their bouffant taffeta dresses to the junior prom with boys whose names are right out of the grade-school reader, not aaron and arnold and marvin, but johnny and billy and jimmy and tod

not portnoy and pincus, but smith and jones and brown! these people are the americans, doctor - like henry aldrich and homer, like the great gildersleeve and his nephew LeRoy, like corliss and veronica, like "oogie pringle" who gets to sing beneath jane powell's window in a date wth judy - these are the people for whom nat "king" cole sings every christmastime, "chestnits roasting on an open fire, jack frost nipping at your nose..." an open fire, in my house? no, no, theirs are the noses whereof he speaks. not his flat black one or my long bumpy one, but those tiny bridgeless wonders whose nostrils point northward automatically at birth. and stay that way for life! these are the children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in union, new jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN - these are the girls and boys who live, "next door," the kids who are always asking for "the jalopy" and getting into "jams" and then out of them again in time for the final commercial - the kids whose neighbors aren't he silversteins and the landaus, but fibber mcgee and molly, and ozzie and harriet, and ethel and albert, and lorenzo jones and his wife belle, and jack armstrong! jack armstrong, the all-american goy! - and jack as in john, not jack as in jake, like my father... look, we ate our meals with the radio blaring right away through to the dessert, the glow of the yellow station band is the last light i see each night before sleep - so don't tell me we're just as good as anybody else, don't tell me we're americans just like they are. no, no, these blond-haired christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place, and they can pump any song they want into the streets and no one is going to stop them either. o america! america! it may have been gold in the streets to my grandparents, it may have been a chicken in every pot to my father and mother, but to me, a child whose earliest movie memories are of ann rutherford and alice faye, america is a shikse nestling under your arm whispering love love love love love!

„Summers were steamy in low-lying Newark, and because the city was partially ringed by extensive wetlands - a major source of malaria back when that, too, was an unstoppable disease - there were swarms of mosquitoes to be swatted and slapped away whenever we sat on beach chairs in the alleys and driveways at night, seeking refuge out of doors from our sweltering flats, where there was nothing but a cold shower and ice water to mitigate the hellish heat. This was before the advent of home air conditioning, when a small black electric fan, set on a table to stir up a breeze indoors, offered little relief once the temperature reached the high nineties, as it did repeatedly that summer for stretches of a week or ten days. Outdoors, people lit citronella candles and sprayed with cans of the insecticide Flit to keep at bay the mosquitoes and flies that were known to have carried malaria, yellow fever, and typhoid fever and were believed by many, beginning with Newark's Mayor Drummond, who launched a citywide "Swat the Fly" campaign, to carry polio. When a fly or a mosquito managed to penetrate the screens of a family's flat or fly in through an open door, the insect would be doggedly hunted down with fly swatter and Flit out of fear that by alighting with its germ-laden legs on one of the household's sleeping children it would infect the youngster with polio. Since nobody then knew the source of the contagion, it was possible to grow suspicious of almost anything, including the bony alley cats that invaded our backyard garbage cans and the haggard stray dogs that slinked hungrily around the houses and defecated all over the sidewalk and street and the pigeons that cooed in the gables of the houses and dirtied front stoops with their chalky droppings. In the first month of the outbreak - before it was acknowledged as an epidemic by the Board of Health - the sanitation department set about systematically to exterminate the city's huge population of alley cats, even though no one knew whether they had any more to do with polio than domesticated house cats.“

“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseball. Only the basketball team was ever any good-twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer-but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all else. Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community-advanced degrees were. Nonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war.“

“I woke abruptly, to a darkness so thick I could breathe it in. My mind was ominously alert, none of that blurry, dream-clogged puzzlement that usually comes with the return of consciousness. It was an alertness I often wished for in daylight—sharp, energetic, skimming through the past hours, the boat trip, the long taxi ride through flat scrubby countryside under a wide white sky, everything that had brought me here. I knew exactly where I was. I remembered the light switch on the bedside lamp even though this was a new place, my first night. I switched it on, but nothing happened. I remembered a row of square plastic buttons on the bed’s headboard and fumbled around until I located them. None of them produced any light.

Now I was baffled, with panic creeping towards me like a little battalion of mice. I got up and groped my way around the room, feeling for the furniture—there wasn’t much of it, as I recalled. It was pitch black and I had no idea what time it was. Maybe it was no time at all. Maybe time had stopped and I was in the afterlife, or some place in between, a dark place, oddly enough with the same layout and furniture as my final room.”

If it was not the afterlife, then it was a room in a hotel in Orkos. Orkos is a town on the Greek island of Naxos, in the Cyclades islands. I was in the middle of the Aegean Sea, on the island where Theseus abandoned Ariadne while she slept, and it was very dark. From my brief exploration shortly after I arrived, I recalled Orkos as a nowhere town, a ghost town. None of the low white buildings dotting the dry landscape had seemed inhabited. No people were on the roads.“

„Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews. When the first shock came in June of 1940--the nomination for the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh, America's international aviation hero, by the Republican Convention at Philadelphia--my father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent with a grade school education, earning a little under fifty dollars a week, enough for the basic bills to be paid on time but for little more. My mother--who'd wanted to go to teachers' college but couldn't because of the expense, who'd lived at home working as an office secretary after finishing high school, who'd kept us from feeling poor during the worst of the Depression by budgeting the earnings my father turned over to her each Friday as efficiently as she ran the household--was thirty-six. My brother, Sandy, a seventh-grader with a prodigy's talent for drawing, was twelve, and I, a third-grader a term ahead of himself--and an embryonic stamp collector inspired like millions of kids by the country's foremost philatelist, President Roosevelt--was seven.

We lived in the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on a tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with redbrick stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge. The Weequahic neighborhood had been built on farm lots at the undeveloped southwest edge of Newark just after World War One, some half dozen of the streets named, imperially, for victorious naval commanders in the Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after FDR's fifth cousin-and the country's twenty-sixth president- the Roosevelt. Our street, Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the neighborhood hill, an elevation as high as any in a port city that rarely rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh to the city's north and east and the deep bay due east of the airport that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty and into the Atlantic.“

„I never witnessed the primal scene, Freud’s keyhole drama in which the child spies the parents in the act. I’m not especially curious about how mine disported themselves in bed. But I have lately become curious about what it felt like for her, my mother. Granted, it’s a subject I don’t know much about. Whatever I write is conjecture, intimations from what I saw and heard, or didn’t—what was conspicuous by its absence. I have a sense that her deepest satisfaction was in the vanity department, and the connection between vanity and sexual pleasure is even more obscure than are the facts in this case.

My father, who was such a vivid presence for me in his lifetime, has since his death been fading like a Polaroid photo going in the wrong direction, from color and definition back to milky blur. I once thought I knew him through and through, each atom; I had studied him with critical scrutiny, as daughters do. Now I’m not sure I knew anything at all except the surface. Now, unless I make a conscious effort to locate the particles of him that lodged in me, he’s like someone I used to see around all the time but never knew very well—the letter carrier or the man who drove the ice-cream truck. Certain people, whether living or dead, need to be physically present in order to be fully apprehended, while others leave traces that more readily adhere. My mother remains as vivid as when I last saw her alive sixteen years ago. I know her better now than I did then.“

“If there is a, what is called, bio-field, "an aura" of a human being, then there must be "an aura" of a whole nation made up of these human beings, though you can't see it with a naked eye.

As far as the notion of "a nation" is concerned, it seems to have, at first glance, quite a clear-cut and easily understandable definition. But there has been so much confusion introduced into this notion recently, that a layman may find himself at a loss. I won't go into the history of this issue but I'll make one obvious statement: if the Ukrainian were not a nation they would have stopped being Ukrainians long time ago. There was some "divine wind" that kept hurling other nations, generation after generation, upon the Ukrainians in the struggle for the possession of a piece of land that God has given Ukrainians to live upon.

And another thing, not connected with terminology. Say, we hear the word "Spain", what associations it brings? Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, Goya, Prado Museum, Federico de Garcia Lorca, and other names and phenomena along these lines. But wait a minute, what about auto-da-fe, Inquisition, Torquemada, conquistadors, expulsion of Jews from Spain, bloody civil wars. All of it is Spain, too. But why the image of the Spanish nation is not associated for us with all those dreadful things? Why culture dominates? We know the poetry of Juan Jimenez, we know the canvases of El Greco, we know the music of Sarasate. That is what creates the aura of the nation. Also, the one that includes the French composer Bizet who wrote an opera about a Spanish gypsy, based on a story by the French writer Merime. American Hemingway writes a novel called "Fiesta", a movable feast.

By the friendship of this poor woman she was carried up to a garret, and immediately delivered of a man child, the story of whose unfortunate birth he himself now relates. My father, being informed of what had happened, flew to the embraces of his darling spouse, and while he loaded his offspring with paternal embraces, could not forbear shedding a flood of tears on beholding the dear partner of his heart (for whose ease he would have sacrificed the treasures of the east) stretched upon a flock bed, in a miserable apartment, unable to protect her from the inclemencies of the weather. It is not to be supposed that the old gentleman was ignorant of what passed, though he affected to know nothing of the matter, and pretended to be very much surprised, when one of his grandchildren, by his eldest son deceased, who lived with him as his heir apparent, acquainted him with the affair;

“It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Twice a week she also cleaned the rural post office, a small gray clapboard shack that looked as if it might have sheltered an Okie family from the winds of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s and that, sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station and the general store, flies its American flag at the junction of the two roads that mark the commercial center of this mountainside town.

Coleman had first seen the woman mopping the post office floor when he went around late one day, a few minutes before closing time, to get his mail—a thin, tall, angular woman with graying blond hair yanked back into a ponytail and the kind of severely sculpted features customarily associated with the church-ruled, hardworking goodwives who suffered through New England's harsh beginnings, stern colonial women locked up within the reigning morality and obedient to it. Her name was Faunia Farley, and whatever miseries she endured she kept concealed behind one of those inexpressive bone faces that hide nothing and bespeak an immense loneliness. Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent. She'd had two years of high school education.”